Assessing heavy metal risks in liquid milk: Dietary exposure and carcinogenicity in China

作者：Yunfeng Yang, Mingjie Pan, Yingying Lin, Haohan Xu, Suhang Wei, Chi Zhang, Sheng Lu, Niu Bing · 发表于：Journal of Dairy Science · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.3168/jds.2025-26459 · 被引用次数：6 · 研究领域：Heavy metals in environment、Heavy Metal Exposure and Toxicity、Chromium effects and bioremediation

China, as the world's second-largest market for dairy products, places significant importance on the safety of such products. In recent years, incidents related to the safety of dairy products have occurred frequently, posing substantial threats to public health and societal stability. The indiscriminate discharge of industrial sewage not only causes environmental pollution, but also may result in the presence of heavy metals in raw milk, thus raising concerns about food safety. This paper establishes a risk assessment model for heavy metal contamination in liquid milk, using dietary exposure assessment and simulation risk assessment. The assessment covers heavy metal contamination in soils and pastures across most provinces in China, excluding Taiwan, Tibet, Macau, and Hong Kong. Employing methods such as the pollution index, spatial cluster analysis, distribution fitting, and carcinogenic risk assessment, the study reveals that the overall pollution levels of heavy metals in the soil of Yunnan Province and Jiangxi Province are particularly severe, and the bioaccumulation effect made heavy metal pollution more pronounced in the forage samples of Yunnan Province. Furthermore, based on transfer factors, residents' daily dietary intake, and local economic levels, the study evaluates the carcinogenic risk and target total risk index of heavy metals in raw milk. The findings highlight that the risk of carcinogenicity and noncarcinogenicity is higher in the [3, 6) age group compar...